I was busy digesting the latest round of Iranian bluster the other day when a horrible thought intruded onto my consciousness. What if President Bush really doesn’t care about the potential consequences of detonating nuclear weapons over Iran? What if he’s fundamentally okay with the idea of a Middle Eastern conflagration that could spiral out of control, because he’s fulfilling his perceived role in God’s plan to bring about the Apocalypse?

Hear me out for a second before you dismiss this as a baseless, Bush-hatin’, liberal fear-mongering ploy. I may be “liberal”, whatever that is supposed to mean, and I definitely oppose most of this Administration’s policies, plans, positions, goals, and actions, but I’m not a knee-jerk dissident.

Consider, if you will, the following facts and observations:

• The concept of the Rapture is visibly and increasingly popular with evangelical American Christians.
• Bush has massive support from most evangelical Christians.
• Bush describes himself as born-again, and generally moves within that evangelical milieu that is a superset, if not the birthplace, of contemporary believers in an imminent Apocalypse.
• The Administration seems to have made a hash of Iraq, doesn?t seem to be offering any solutions beyond a half-assed occupation, and is now making ominous noises in Tehran’s direction, of the same sort that preceded our invasion of Iraq.

But of this, so what?

I wouldn’t have made much of those points either, until I remembered the question he fielded on March 19:

“Do you believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs of the apocalypse? And if not, why not?”

What bothers me is that he didn’t answer the question. It clearly rattled him to have to come up with an answer over an open microphone. Taking transparent pains to say neither “yes” nor “no”, he replied:

“The answer is, I haven’t really thought of it that way.. Here’s how I think of it. The first I’ve heard of that, by the way. I guess I’m more of a practical fellow.”

What does that mean, that he’s a “practical fellow?? I heard this on the air and you could practically hear the sweat breaking out on his brow as emitted a decidedly unpresidential hypventilatory laugh while madly shifting mental gears, trying to come up with a suitable piece of nullspeak. He wriggled and groped, ultimately evading the question altogether.

Don’t just take my word for it, though: listen for yourself (the question about the Apocalypse is a little past the middle of the audio segment). Listen to it and then try and tell me that you can’t immediately percieve the equivocation.

Add Ahmadinejad (a rabid nationalist and general ideological chum of the oppressive, regressive, and reactionary clerics that hold power in Iran) to the mix, potentially armed with atomic weapons. I think you’ll agree with me that most of the solutions to this formula have an outcome of “Oh, shit”.